Eric B and Rakim — “The R” from Follow the Leader (1988, UNI/MCA)
I promise that this is not a flex, something that I think will become clear as I go on, but for most of my life people have told me that I’m smart. It’s a nice thing to hear, even if it does activate my imposter syndrome. As an educator, I think that everyone is smart, but each of us in our own way. So while I don’t disagree with that very kind assessment, I’m also aware that there are many ways in which I’m real dumb.
For example, I can’t ever remember the rules to a card game. You could teach me a game today, and tomorrow I’ll have forgotten how it goes and need to be shown again. There are actually a handful of things like that: I can’t ever remember the difference between the US Senate and the House of Representatives (is that congress?). No matter how many times a contestant on Alone demonstrates how deadfall traps work, I still can’t get it, which is fine, because when I try to kill mice it isn’t for purposes of bolstering my protein consumption. And no matter how many times I see a documentary, etc. explaining the way in which Rakim revolutionized rhyming, therefore changing hip-hop forever, I can’t keep it straight. I think maybe it has to do with internal rhyme, something about folding paper.
But let’s backtrack.
Years and years ago, at once seeming like last week and another lifetime, I shared digital music files with a roommate (please don’t go to the feds — look at all I do for you), and have been walking around with Eric B. and Rakim records in my iTunes/Apple Music library ever since. I’ve always known that they were important, that other MCs refer to Rakim as “The God Rakim” (but not that he goes by Rakim Allah), and was most familiar with their hit “Paid in Full,” but beyond that, I discovered this week, had a lot of gaps in my knowledge. (And as an aside, that’s what’s so wonderful about this enterprise — I get to do a lot of learning).
For instance, I guess I only sort of knew that Eric B was the DJ, which seems like pretty foundational knowledge on which to have such a tenuous grasp. This means that I also didn’t have a grasp on just how menacing his production is. And, most relevant to our purposes here, didn’t know that Rakim often refers to himself in verse as “the R.”
As for that business of him changing hip-hop, let me see if I can’t take a stab at this. Maybe writing it out will solidify it in my memory. From what I was able to gather, Rakim was influenced by jazz music, likely because his mom was an opera and jazz singer and so things like Coltrane (perhaps his most serious influence) were always playing at the house. And while most rap at that time period was essentially rhyming couplets with an AABB end rhyme scheme, Rakim plotted sixteen dots on a piece of paper, one dot for each bar, and then sought “to fill each rhyme bar with multi-syllabic [sic] word patterns that benefited from rhyme alliteration and complex metaphor.” In doing this, he also often stretched bars to the next line, thereby avoiding the simplistic rhyme scheme that ruled the day.
I think that for me it was difficult to understand the significance of this innovation because just about all of hip-hop has followed his lead in terms of rhyme flow. But it’s worth considering the environment into which Rakim introduced this complexity. Eric B and Rakim met in 1985. That year Schoolly D dropped his eponymous debut, Jazzy Jeff gave us On Fire, Grandmaster Flash came back with They Said it Couldn’t Be Done, LL Cool J’s Radio was dominant, Kurtis Blow got political on America, Too Short put Oakland on the map with Players, etcetera. And all of these, while certainly important records, employed the AABB end rhyme structure.
Given this landscape, when we think about Follow the Leader, that sophomore Eric B. and Rakim album that followed Paid in Full, it’s important to consider where it sits in time. Released in 1988, it’s only four years removed from such rudimentary records as The Fat Boys’ debut. This comes through in the beat, which begins with some pretty entry level drum machine boom bap, harkening back to the very recent past, especially some of Rick Rubin’s production, and, given where it is situated in history, this sound makes absolute sense.
But then four years later, in 1992, The Chronic would hit shelves. And honestly, Eric B’s beat also contains a string line that, while characteristically menacing, almost seems to forecast the G-Funk sound that was right around the corner and for which Dre’s debut remains a showpiece.
So yeah, hip-hop was in a golden age and innovation was everywhere, but after sitting with this song and, really, the whole catalog, it’s difficult for me to think of anyone who innovated more than this, save for DJ Kool Herc. I don’t expect Rakim will ever read these words, but if he does, I don’t expect he’ll be mad.
And, for the record, I have absolutely no doubt that the man is way smarter than I am.
The Shuffler 